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The Air Is Full of Secrets

Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice. “Ripple Effect” offers a broad sampling of Equi’s career, 159 poems, proving her as capable of a memorable four-line epigram as she is of an elegant pantoum, jokey self-interview, surreal meditation on the color yellow or tender lyric sequence. The book showcases a sensibility troubled by what happens around her, but capable of being charmed by “the exotic way / everything normal / begins looking / in order to / win you back.”

Thoughtful, witty, curious, Equi has known from early in her career that “the air is full of secrets” and has gone out to find them, to bring them “down to earth where all poetry begins.” Her poems generally emerge from immediate encounters with the objects, people, events and language of everyday life rather than from memory or hyperintimate experience. Her intention is to comment rather than cry, to report back from the “soft vague / border between speech / and silence.” But though it tends toward the objective, distant perspective, Equi’s work does not lack for deep feeling. “It is the heart’s story / I most want to share / with you,” she writes. Not necessarily her heart, but the heart, the emotional core of daily experiences.

Equi is a poet of transformations, exploring the pathway linking inner and outer worlds, dream life and lived life, heart and mind. She finds inspiration everywhere, in the merged shadows of people exercising in a gymnasium, a dose of Ambien or the idea of unisex colognes, in the taste of sorbet, the day’s mail, the table of contents for an imaginary book. She writes poems inspired by fleeting sensation, such as her quick hymn in praise of desserts; poems consisting of numbered lists; deft homages to poets who have influenced her, including Frank O’Hara, and H.D. Equi takes it all in and gives it back in language that can be appropriately flat, as in the poem about her mail (“A long letter / from a new friend / in Minnesota / where it’s even colder / than it is here”) or flagrantly showy, as in this observation of a fish in an aquarium: “a busy, frizzy / bringing and brought / behind the somehow seductive / fanfare of fins.”

Photo

Credit
Carey Sookocheff

In “A Poetics of Optics,” Equi writes that “all images bank on alchemy.” This idea captures her fundamental sense of poetry as turning common material into something rare and valuable. It also underscores her belief in the magical powers of the word, how language changes what it names into poems in the same way that “mirrors / transform / us into ourselves.”

Equi is an urban poet; she was raised around Chicago and has been a New Yorker since the 1980s. Though nature occasionally appears — a poem about “lesbian” corn, an image of a prairie landscape — her basic material is city life. When she writes about the spray of rising and falling water, she is writing of fountains in Trafalgar Square or Washington square. Her poems are typically brief, crowded with things noted in passing and intensely considered until “eventually meaning / does arrive.” They reflect a philosophical intelligence seeking sense in an environment that lacks it. A “lonely, intrepid rationalist besieged by spirits,” Equi uses poetry to express the fantastical and incongruent feeling of contemporary life.

A main theme throughout Equi’s career has been the poet’s sense of connection with her community despite the chaos around her. “Truly many / have stood where I stand, and I understand them.” Her spirit is generous, embracing, and her work is shot through with good humor, wordplay, a comic vision, as when imaginary Puritans “without a hint of child’s play” in them are seen to “creak / as they walk / like doors left open / to bang in the wind.” She finds offbeat pleasure in mundane details, noting that “almonds make me feel like autumn all year long” or celebrating 63 pairs of pink shutters opened wide in a narrow alley. In a poem entitled “The Banal,” Equi finds that “the everyday / is radiant.”

There is also anger, melancholy, loss. Equi understands that “we all have so many grave insults / engraved upon us.” “Real violence” has become familiar, almost “mellow in the air.” Pills and counselors appear repeatedly. So does the feeling of “a headache being just another word for reality.” But, time and again, words work their curative sorcery. Writing about the ubiquity of grief and sorrow, Equi toys with notions of lamentation, losing herself in aspects of the word “lamentation” itself until “I’ve lost my sense of loss.”

Her poems examine and enact the phenomenon of attentiveness. In doing so, they encourage readers to see anew the everyday things that fascinate the poet, showing us how “in brine daylight / thought becomes brimmed. / Fraught with sudden, / steeped in listening.” Equi’s is a bracing, resonant art.

Floyd Skloot’s most recent books are the poetry collection “The End of Dreams” and the novel “Patient 002,” which will appear this month.